Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Candy: Yeah, but that’s not necessarily TSTL behavior, though, is it? I define TSTL behavior to be when a person rushes into danger, or steadfastly refuses to heed warning signs or take basic safety precautions in hazardous situations. An unarmed, gently-reared woman who INSISTS on going riding alone when there’ve been reports of brigand raids in the area is TSTL. An armed man who insists on the same is definitely taking a risk, but at least he’s better-equipped to deal with the danger. Furthermore, TSTL behavior is often (but not always) followed by the other protagonist being forced to rescue the other person out of the completely avoidable consequences brought on by the TSTL behavior. I have NEVER seen a heroine having to rescue a TSTL hero out of an untenable situation that he could’ve avoided if he’d only, say, taken a big heavy stick with him before checking out that strange noise in the cellar.

And that’s the thing. I don’t think we’ll ever see a true TSTL hero. Having a hero who needs rescuing from his own stupidity is not sexy. Having a hero who’s that incompetent is just lame. I think heroines are allowed to be TSTL partly because everyone (including feminists like me) assumes women are more helpless than men, and in some ways featherheaded behavior is more forgivable. And of course we don’t need to be sexually attracted to the heroine, so that type of stupid mong behavior is more easily forgiven in a heroine (though we may find it annoying as shit) but I doubt we’d forgive the same kind of thing in a hero. This may, in fact, be one of the few areas in which the hero has a lot less leeway given to him than a heroine.

Sarah: No, it’s certainly not TSTL behavior. I don’t think a hero has ever done that kind of thing, blindly and blithely wandered into danger, like the dumb chick in a horror movie going into the scary creepy dark house alone. I have seen a few books where the hero has ended up in a tight spot and his girlfriend has had to bail him out, but that was just intervention, not saving him from his own stupid bloody self.

I know of a few books in which both the villain momentarily outsmarted the heroine and the hero, and in one case the hero’s mistress bailed him out—but that wasn’t due to heedlessness or sheer idiocy. It was more due to circumstances and a good bit of cunning on the part of the villain. However, whenever that has happened, and the hero and the heroine are bailed out, the hero redeems himself in the reader’s eyes by kicking the ever living shit out of the villain and company, and makes himself into the big strong ass kicking danger man that he is meant to be. He may be momentarily down but as a romance hero, is never wussed out.

You are completely right that weakness is not favored for heroes. Even heroes who are physically weak are brilliantly smart, artistically gifted, blessed with a six foot dong - it is a rule, it seems, that a hero must be Spectacularly Endowed in one (or more) areas and if that area isn’t physical strength, his skill in another venue more than makes up for his lack of manful brute strength. A hero cannot be a wuss. And I am ok with that. I expect the hero to be worthy of the heroine. I HATE it, however, when the heroine is not worthy of the hero’s effort to gain her attention.

Candy: I think we expect the hero to be worthy of the heroine in very specific ways, and the heroine to be worthy of the hero in other specific ways. Can you imagine a romance novel in which the hero bumbles around as much as some heroines do and still coming across as attractive? I don’t like either the hero or heroine to thoughtlessly endanger themselves, of course, but when it comes down to it I really do think I’ll find it easier to forgive the heroine for TSTL behavior (up to a point) vs. a hero.

So much for me being a feminist who enjoys the subversion of gender roles, eh? I enjoy my subversion only SO FAR and no further, dammit. Sigh.

What I do like are situations in which the heroine is set up for a grand rescue scene, and she ends up rescuing herself, and all the hero has to do is mop up what’s left of the villain. Loretta Chase has one such scene in Viscount Vagabond that’s just hilarious.

Sarah: Well, there’s subversion of gender roles, and then there’s inconsistency. I mean, I do know plenty of individual women who are indeed pretty damn dim. But do I know a dude that stupid, who would walk down the subway tunnels because someone told him there was treasure just past the 42nd street station? Not really. I think it might also be a cultural thing—there is still a good bit of opinion that the Men take care of the Women and there is some shifting in the seat when one encounters the reverse. How does a stay-at-home husband deal with his powerful, breadwinning wife? It happens, but a lot of people wonder what its like because it isn’t always common, especially outside of urban areas.

And also, consider the readership: women read romance novels, and sometimes, you’re looking for a juicy escape to sweep you away, and a hero that sweeps you and the heroine off her feet is a delicious way to spend an hour. Sure it obeys gender roles that are insufferable when you come up against them in Real Life, but sometimes, it’s just delicious.

First of all, the vast majority of fiction is pretty predictable. When I pick up an SF or fantasy adventure novel, I know for a fact that the Evil Empire will be defeated by the end of the book or the trilogy, or in the case of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, by the end of about 873 books in which the most prominent feature is Rand Al’Thor pondering his navel and whining about his fate with ever-increasing tiresomeness. If I decide to read a mystery novel or a thriller, I know the murderer, terrorist or other flavor of Very Bad Person will be caught. The monster/ghost/alien with a penchant for eviscerating humans and feasting on their steaming remains/evilly animated inanimate object/rabid doggie will be vanquished at the end of a horror novel, unless the author leaves a couple of ends loose in preparation for a sequel or spin-off, or unless you’re Richard Matheson, in which case your absolutely wonderful, groundbreaking novella about vampires will be turned into a dizzyingly campy yet oddly enjoyable 70s cheese-fest starring Charlton Heston.

But that’s genre fiction! some people may cry. Literary fiction is another thing entirely!

And this is where I get to sound kind of like a Mary Bly/Eloisa James interview, only with words like “ass” thrown in: It really doesn’t get a whole lot more literary than Shakespeare, right? I mean, the dude’s single-handedly responsible for preserving a whole host of English words we would’ve otherwise forgotten, and year after year parents of high school kids around the world are subjected to yet another painful interpretation of Midsummer Night’s Dream. How’s this for predictability: almost every comedy features misunderstandings galore between two different sets of couples, and if it’s a particularly sassy comedy, there’s some cross-dressing for added hilarity, but every comedy will end happily and the right couples will be paired up at the end. Every Shakespearean tragedy ends with loads of people dying, usually after some kind of bitter irony or revelation: “You dope, I wasn’t REALLY dead! Curse the lack of UPS Red in 16th-century Verona! Ah crap, might as well stab myself and join loverboy” or “Mwaaaahahahaha, you like that pie? That was actually ASS PIE, made from YOUR DEAD SONS’ ASSES!”

Other “literary” authors who wrote predictable (and dare I say, even formulaic) fiction include such esteemed Dead White Men and Women like Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Flannery O’Connor and Charles Dickens—and these are just a few names off the top of my head. I mean, honestly, did you really expect Tess of the D’Urbervilles to end in any way other than it did? Pfff. And Flannery O’Connor—I love her work and wrote my senior thesis on her short stories, but once you spot the trick, the payoff to her tales, you can see ‘em coming a mile away. That doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of her off-kilter, grotesque narratives; actually, I enjoy trying to guess HOW exactly the payoff is going to happen. This is pretty much the same anticipation I feel in seeing how the hero and heroine in a romance novel achieve their HEA, or even in guessing how much more Jude’s life is going to suck before Hardy puts the poor schmuck out of his misery already.

I do grant that literary fiction has much fewer qualms about killing off likeable protagonists and occasionally allowing the Evil Empire to win. But even these types of fiction often follow a sort of well-worn pattern. In fact, reading some modern works, you can almost sense the authors gleefully rubbing their hands at the thought of the bittersweet irony they’ll interject into the books, ignoring with equal glee that just about every goddamn work of modern literary fiction in the past 30-40 years has been about bittersweet irony. And there’s nothing wrong with that, really. Hey, I adored The Corrections despite the mind-numbingly stupid hype that surrounded it.

There are a million different ways to work and re-work a theme, even something as timeworn as the story of two people finding love and happiness with each other. Depending on the author, the theme can be made fresh and new and beautiful, or it can become hackneyed, trite and boring. If love stories don’t rock your world, then just say so. Don’t try to claim that they all suck because they’re so predictable, because if you’re holding a John Grisham book while you make that claim, I will point at you and laugh. LOUDLY.

Larissa discusses a few possibilities as to why she feels the way she does, and she says:

I’m not sure why I tend to not like heroines in romance novels. It may be that I expect a lot from women, so heroines sometimes disappoint. It may be that I want to relate to them, but I often can’t.

I think there’s another possibility that wasn’t brought up: it might be because of an odd species of competitiveness/possessiveness. Not that these readers are looney tunes and think the heroes are real and therefore are jealous of the heroine because she gets him and they don’t, but remember back in school when you had that massive crush on Simon LeBon or Jordan Knight or whoever, and they were YOURS and you got pissed off if your best friend developed a crush on him too? I’m thinking that maybe the extreme identification with the hero may originate from similar roots.

Now keep in mind this is just a theory and pure speculation on my part. I’ve been known to engage in colorectal linguistics, and this may very well be one of those times.

Something else I want to talk about is the issue of character identification, and what I find appealing (and not appealing) about romance novel protagonists. I don’t need to identify with the hero or heroine in order for me to like the book. To tell you the truth, the average romance novel hero is way too high-maintenance and has far too much emotional baggage for me to handle in real life, but I still love reading books featuring really tormented heroes. Ditto the heroine. It’s nice when the author is able to create characters who are so damn likeable you wished they lived next door so you could invite them over on weekends to watch bad movies with you and snark at them together (Christy and Anne from To Love and to Cherish did actually inspire that kind of wistfulness in me), but it’s certainly not a necessity. What I do need is for the hero and heroine to be convincing, sympathetic entities to whom I can relate on a very basic level, and who behave in consistent, non-annoying ways.

These are my very general guidelines for what I consider to be a good romance novel hero:

• He needs to be HOT. I don’t mean he has to be muscle-bound, and I don’t mean he has to have chiseled features. There just needs to be something about him that’s overwhelmingly attractive, and mostly that’s personality-driven, though I do have certain physical trait “dealbreakers” that are due to my own tastes in real life. I’m not physically attracted to overweight men, for example. I’m chubby enough for the both of us, thanks. But yeah, the hero has to be hot. He has to talk hot, act hot and to a certain degree, look hot. Jennifer Crusie’s Harlequins like Getting Rid of Bradley and What The Lady Wants had heroes who weren’t particularly good-looking in the traditional sense, but something about them was just, you know. HOT.
• At the end of the day, he needs to treat the heroine like a queen, and if he’s engaged in any rat bastardry, he has to beat himself up appropriately over it and be really really really really really sorry he assumed, said or did any of the asstarded things he has to the beyond-patient heroine.

These are my very general guidelines for what I consider to be a good romance novel heroine:

• She needs to be not-stupid. I don’t mean smart, though I do enjoy reading books about intellectually gifted women. But she can’t be Too Stupid To Live, and should she engage in TSTL behavior, she needs to be appropriately remorseful and not repeat the behavior again. All I ask from my heroines is that at no point do I feel compelled to yell out loud or think very, very emphatically “THAT IS REALLY FUCKING STUPID. PLEASE DIE SO WE CAN REMOVE YOU FROM THE GENE POOL, K THX.”
• She can’t be too perfect. I hate perfect heroines. Oh look, she’s a healer, and a sharpshooter, and a super horsewoman, and she’s beautiful, and she has magnificent ta-tas, and her hey-nanner-nanner is always lavishly well-lubricated yet pleasingly tight, and she’s possessed of more compassion than the Goddess of Mercy and the Virgin Mary combined, and she’s super-smart, and emotionally vulnerable yet grounded at the same time.... FEH. I don’t want a paragon. I want a real woman, not Nancy fucking Drew.

Yeah, notice how I didn’t list “hot” anywhere in my requirements for the heroine. Double-standards? Oh you betcha. I guess I do want the heroine to be attractive and practice appropriate personal hygiene and all that jazz, but mostly it’s because I want the hero’s attraction to her to be believable. To phrase it another way: the hero has to be hot to me and to the heroine, but the heroine just has to be hot to the hero. For example, Seize the Fire has a heroine who’s downright plain, but it doesn’t matter because Sheridan (talk about a HOT hero who manages to tread the very, very fine line dividing good guys from bad) finds her supremely attractive. Yeah, I know, personal fantasy fulfillment much?

And of course I don’t want a TSTL hero, and I don’t want a heroine who abuses the hero non-stop either, but generally these aren’t major problems in romance novels; the problems with characterization that I see over and over again seem to be pretty clearly demarcated along gender lines. Even with my very simple criteria, it’s amazing how many authors fuck it up, and the multitude of ways this fuckage can happen are also legion. A bad heroine will spoil my reading experience just as surely as a bad hero will. I do find that writers generally fuck up both of them at the same time. If the hero is annoying, chances are the heroine will be just as annoying too. I can’t think of any time my experience has mirrored Larissa’s, in which I hate (and I mean HATE, not just “feel mildly and occasionally annoyed with") the heroine but still end up loving the hero and, consequently, the book.

It’s not all about the man for me. Not even close. I’m all about the equal opportunity hateration, baby. And the equal-opportunity love.